1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a cooling device for an optical information recording/reproducing apparatus, which can cool a movable mechanism for an optical pickup housed in a casing.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Recently, there have been noticed optical information recording/reproducing apparatuses which can record information in a recording medium at high density by applying a light beam to the medium and reproduce the recorded information at high speed.
In the above-mentioned apparatus, an optical pickup mounted on a carriage is coarsely moved in the radial direction of a disk recording medium (referred to as a disk) so as to be accessible to a target track of the disk at high speed. As means for driving the pickup, a voice coil motor (referred to as VCM) is adopted. Further, in some apparatus, an external scale is used for locating the pickup.
With the VCM, since heat is generated from the driving coil, there exists a problem in that the generated heat exerts a harmful influence upon the optical system; for instance, the optical axis thereof is shifted due to thermal expansion of the system. Therefore, the heat generating section such as the VCM is required to be cooled.
Japanese Published Unexamined Patent Appl. No. 60-107789 discloses an example of prior art cooling devices, in which cooling air stream obtained by a fan mounted on a door is directly blown against a head disk assembly to be cooled. In the above prior art device, although cooling air is blown from the right or reverse side of a disk, since the fan is disposed away from the head disk assembly and therefore the cooling air is readily diffused, it is difficult to effectively cool the VCM which generates heat.